When a squadron comes home, it does it with flair. A giant formation flight rakes over the base in a deafening roar, and to meet it, there are handmade signs up and down the main residential roads, yellow ribbons on all the palm trees, and individual welcome banners on the houses. The inside of our hangar was draped in the biggest American flag I had ever seen, probably twenty-five yards long, and local news crews competed with private photographers hired by the wives to capture shots of the reuniting couples and families. It happened on a Friday, the day before the Fourth of July, which made for a double dose of patriotism and local news coverage.
I had helped decorate the hangar the night before with the wives’ club and hung giant squadron-themed banners, which took just enough time to confirm that they were all as tired and on edge as me. I’d painted a sign—“Welcome Home!”—and hung it on our garage door. I’d gotten a new dress, restocked the refrigerator, and washed the dog and the vehicles, but I hadn’t hired a photographer or invited any family out. So much of our reunion felt uncertain to me—would he be mad at how much of our old stuff I’d thrown away in the sudden move, or how badly I’d messed up the checkbook register and the taxes? What if I couldn’t shake the awkwardness and anger I’d felt in Singapore? I didn’t want anybody around taking pictures of this experiment if it might be doomed to blow up.
On the morning of the fly-in, I felt dangerously unaccompanied. Two big buckets of hand-sized American flags sat on a table next to hand-frosted jet-shaped cookies. I grabbed a flag to have something to fidget with. All the little kids were dressed in red, white, and blue. With no parents or in-laws to wrangle, and no little kid to bounce on my hip or to yell at to watch where he poked that flag, I felt like an unbalanced equation, like I shouldn’t be there at all. Instead, I stood around and tried to smile like this was the most natural thing in the world, spending a morning all dolled up in an overdecorated jet hangar and waiting for my husband, who had morphed into a weird abstraction of longing, to roar home after six months of being gone.
Someone called my name from across the hangar and I was asked if I spoke Spanish. I said sure, thinking a relative needed directions where to park, but instead I came face-to-face with a beautiful reporter in lavender and pink with her shoulder-length black hair flipped up at the ends. She asked if she could interview me for Univision, and I said sure, this time a little more hesitantly. Mine is simple, present-tense, statement-of-fact Spanish, like “The weather is nice,” or “Damn, these are good tacos,” not nuanced, thoughtful Spanish capable of reflection and prediction. It’s ironic, perhaps, but the grammatical tense in which my mind naturally rests, the subjunctive tense of possibility and wish and longing, is the exact tense I can’t seem to master in Spanish.
She set me up in front of a cameraman, who adjusted his camera for “white values,” which he claimed had to do with using the flag as a backdrop and not having the white come off as blue, but I smiled and imagined a “gringa” knob on the camera that he was torquing up to “high.” He needed it—the beautiful reporter’s questions were met with tense, staccato answers.
“What are you waiting for today?”
“My husband comes home after six months on a boat.”
“How do you feel?”
“Happy. Nervous.”
“What have you been doing to prepare?” She had to ask this one again in English.
“Um, clean, clean, clean.” I tried furiously to conjugate verbs for “I haven’t cooked real food in six months,” but it didn’t come. Instead I gave a constipated smile and shrug.
“Has anything changed since he’s been gone?”
“Yes, um, I move house because of a, um”—in English: “drive-by shooting”—“so it’s a new house. He doesn’t know where.”
Her eyes widened and she dropped the smile for a second to say, “Wow, really?” Then: “Is this is a new dress today?”
“Yes, a new dress.” I felt like the idiot I must have sounded like and wondered if this was the curse of being a Navy wife—the only chance you get to explain yourself and it has to be in a foreign language in three-inch heels in front of the world’s biggest flag. They turned off the camera and my IQ immediately bounced back up. I gushed promises to her that I did once speak Spanish, long ago, but that my husband speaks much, much more fluently. She said they would come find him when he landed.
The flyover itself was geometrically beautiful, a twelve-plane formation shaped like a broad arrow, like a kite I had when I was little. I knew which plane was Ross’s. It appeared not to move at all, just to grow bigger and louder on the horizon, part of a frozen hieroglyphic against the mild blue of the morning sky. It was over in seconds. They swept over us in a wave of noise and before I realized it, I had started to cry. It wasn’t the flags or the decorations or all the families, it wasn’t the stress and the fatigue of waiting, and it wasn’t really even the anticipation of seeing him again and having him next to me. It was that awful and wonderful gap between who we were on the ground and this bigger, scarier, completely mysterious thing he becomes up in the air.